ursting deluge, and given the government the
final impulse into the abyss of bankruptcy, was dismissed with the rich
archbishopric of Sens and a cardinal's hat for himself, and good
sinecures for his kinsfolk. His last official act was to send for the
20,000 livres for his month's salary, not fully due. His brother, the
Count of Brienne, remained in office as Minister of War. He was a person
of no talent, his friends allowed, but 'assisted by a good chief clerk,
he would have made a good minister; he meant well.' This was hardly a
sufficient reason for letting him take 100,000 francs out of an
impoverished treasury for the furniture of his residence. The hour,
however, was just striking, and the knife was sharpened.

[Footnote 13: Morellet's _Memoires_, i. 17-21; 262-270; and ii. 15.]

[Footnote 14: Marmontel's _Memoires_, bk. xiii.; Morellet, however, with
persevering friendliness, denies the truth of Marmontel's picture (ii.
465).]

All his paltry honour and glory Lomenie de Brienne enjoyed for a season,
until the Jacobins laid violent hands upon him. He poisoned himself in
his own palace, just as a worse thing was about to befall him. Alas,
poetic justice is the exception in history, and only once in many
generations does the drama of the state criminal rise to an artistic
fifth act. This was in 1794. In 1750 a farewell dinner had been given in
the rooms of the Abbe de Brienne at the Sorbonne, and the friends made
an appointment for a game of tennis behind the church of the Sorbonne in
the year 1800.[15] The year came, but no Lomenie, nor Turgot, and the
Sorbonne itself had vanished.

[Footnote 15: Morellet, i. 21.]

When the time arrived for his final acceptance of an ecclesiastical
destination, Turgot felt that honourable repugnance, which might have
been anticipated alike from his morality and his intelligence, to enter
into an engagement which would irrevocably bind him for the rest of his
life, either always to hold exactly the same opinions, or else to
continue to preach them publicly after he had ceased to hold them
privately. No certainty of worldly comfort and advantage could in his
eyes counterbalance the possible danger and shame of a position, which
might place him between the two alternatives of stifling his
intelligence and outraging his conscience--the one by blind,
unscrutinising, and immovable acceptance of all the dogmas and
sentiments of the Church; the other by the inculcation as truths of wh